Every single time I make a poo, I get up, turn around, look down, and inspect it. I do the same with urine, and snot too I suppose. Everything that comes out of my body gets an inspection. I assume that every single person on the world does the exact same thing. Why wouldn't you? What if you didn't and your stool was blood red, covered in blood, and all bloody. Wouldn't it be better to know?

Sometimes I am quite impressed with my movement. Sometimes the color is weird, or the shape is weird, or the size is incredible. I have noticed that since I began my 30 days experiment, that my poo is less frequent, yet quite lengthy. It is amazing. Sometimes my urine is yellow, sometimes practically clear, and on occasion some other color. I find these things to be quite interesting.

I wonder why people don't talk about these things. Wouldn't it be safer for everyone to share their stories and thoughts on the subject, and even compare stories of amazing poos, or perhaps urinary colors?

I think these things should be spoken about openly and honestly. Because if you say that you don't inspect these things upon production, you are a filthy liar. You are lying to yourself, and to others. Come on everyone, let's talk about shit and stuff! Every single person on Earth has to crap and piss at some point. So if everyone on the planet is involved, isn't that truly the one thing that binds us as a human race. Why is there a single shred of shame involved? There should be a U.N. of poop, the United Poop, the U.P. What do we have to do to get that going? Maybe I'll start a movement. 8-).

I went to the Dallas Stars hockey game last night. I scored tickets in the UPS suite. Free freshly cooked food (each suite has its own chef), and all the alcohol you want is free and at your disposal. It was Mike Modano Appreciation night, so it was pretty cool. Turns out, Mike Modano's suite is right next door to the UPS suite, so Mike's mom and dad, his wife, and former NHL great Brett Hull were all right beside me. They were maybe 10 feet away at the most. I was texting back and forth with a friend from my hockey team, and his was response was "cool, go get an autograph". Should I get him to autograph something? He is a legend in hockey. He scored the game winning goal in game 7 of the Stanley Cup playoffs in 1999, the only year the Stars have ever won the cup, and now he is currently a Co-GM of the Dallas Stars.

Then a few minutes later some obviously drunk guy who was in the suite as well came over to get Brett to sign an jersey. The look on Brett's face was priceless. He looked so disgusted. Those suites cost thousands of dollars per event, he is there with Mike Modano's family, and now this drunk guy wants an autograph. He signed the jersey, and the guy said thanks, and walked away. Brett had this look of disgust for a couple of minutes atfer the guy walked away.

It made me start thinking, I am really not that guy at all. I am not "go get an autograph" guy. I would rather glance over at Brett Hull and give him a simple nod of acknowledgement and approval than to ask for an autograph. This way he knows that I see him and recognize him, and I don't bother him at all. I guess its probably due to the way I was raised. My grandparents would come over for Christmas, and literally stand by the door until someone asked them to come on in, make themselves at home, and have a seat. They were old school, and I guess some of that type of mentality rubbed off on me. Anyway, I guess I picked up from stuff like that to leave people alone. So, are you a "go get an autograph" kinda person?

Today is Thanksgiving, and as is tradition, I am going to the Dallas Cowboys game. I will cook out in the parking lot with 60,000 of my closest friends for my Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe Jerry Jones or Emmit Smith or John Madden or someone cool will be cooking in the parking slot right next time, and I won't get their autograph either.

I feel completely different in the morning than I do at night. I wonder if this happens to everyone? Sometimes I will go to bed at night with what seems to be the greatest idea ever, then when I wake up, I feel exactly the opposite. Sometimes I will have the greatest plan in the world right after I wake up, then that night, I no longer feel that way. I don't really have much more on the subject. When I woke up the other day it seemed like the perfect topic, but now, not.

I called in sick to work today. I do not have a cold or flu like symptoms, I just did not want to go today. Technically, I am not lying or cheating in any way though, because I am sick... I am sick of going to work. Does that count? I think it should.

So far I woke up at 10am and watched The Price is Right. I have been wanting to stay home from work and watch it for a while since Drew Carey took over for Bob Barker. When I was little, I sort of enjoyed being sick and staying home from school, just so I could watch The Price is Right. It is a spectacular show. Then, I ate some oatmeal and made some Jello. Next I ordered a new book from Amazon.com. It is Steve Martin's autobiography called Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life. I have been waiting for the book to come out for 3 or 4 months, and it finally comes out tomorrow. Also tomorrow, the new video game Rock Band comes out for the XBOX360. I have been waiting for it for a nearly a year. It is like the Guitar Hero series, except it has a guitar, drums, and a microphone, so it should be fun. If you have two guitars, then someone can additionally play the bass. so you can have four people 'jamming' at once. Best Buy will be open at midnight to sell it, but I think I will go to Fry's tomorrow morning around 8:30am and see if I can get it there instead.

So for the rest of the day my only plans are to go to the post office to get a shipping envelope for something I need to return, fill up my 5 gallon gas tank, because I like filling up my motorcycle at home in the garage, rather than at the gas station, and eat a late lunch. I will probably have some shrimp. I may go for a short afternoon motorcycle journey. Then I will prepare for the Monday Night Football game. I hit a 3 game football parlay yesterday, which returned 6 times the amount of money wagered. It was good times.

I think if I had just a few million bucks, I could easily live out the balance of my life and be perfectly happy. I really don't need much to occupy my time. I find myself rarely getting bored anymore.

I will apologize in advance for the length of this post, whereas it will be quite lengthy.

Ever since I was a small boy, I've always been fascinated by motorcycles. I would ride my bicycle around wishing it was motorized, and would sometimes pretend that it was. Sometimes, like most young boys, I would even go so far as to attach something to the forks and frame that would stick into the spokes, like playing cards, so that it would make a motorcycle sound while I was riding. At one point, my brother and I had a little mini-bike frame that we always wanted to build a mini-bike out of. This never happened, but it didn't stop us from pushing each other around on it.

When I was about 11, I moved to the other side of town and there was a neighborhood kid there that owned a small Honda 50CC motorcycle. This was my first real experience with motorcycle riding, and it was awesome! It was exactly like a bicycle except you did not have to pedal. You could do wheelies, jump, jam the back brake and slide the back wheel around, just like on a bike. A couple of other kids in the neighborhood also later obtained ATVs in the form of a 3-wheeler and 4-wheeler, but I was always drawn to the motorcycle. The kid who owned it was quite gracious in letting me ride it all the time. I loved it. I would even dream about motorcycle riding, sometimes on a nightly basis.

One time I discovered that another friend had a much larger motorcycle off in the corner of an old shed behind his house. It was always just sort of a pile of unused junk. It didn't work, so they just basically discarded it. One day I convinced him that we should bust it out and see what we could do with it. Worst case scenario, we could take turns coasting it down a nearby hill, just for fun. We took the bike out of the shed and give it a decent cleaning, as good as two 11 year old boys could. We then proceeded to pushing each other around on it as fast as humanly possible at 11 years of age. At one point, as I was being pushed around on it, I wondered what would happen if I popped it in gear. Now, I should say that when I rode the little 50cc bike, there was no clutch, you just switched gears by only moving the lever, and when you are 11, the hand-eye coordination for advanced motorcycle operation maybe be a little bit out of your league, if you have no past experience. So as I as being pushed as fast as my friend could push me, I kicked the thing into first gear and gave the throttle a twist. The damn thing started up and took off, with me hanging on for dear life. At that time, it was one of the scariest things I had ever experienced. Once I let off the throttle, I had the piece of mind to push on the foot brake pedal, so I was able to stop, but once I stopped the thing just kinda fell over. When you are 11, you cannot reach the ground on a early 1980s Honda CR80. Once we realized the motorcycle did work, we took a few turns riding it around a nearby pasture for a few days, then it stopped working again. In hindsight, we probably could have gotten the thing running again, but our attention spans were not good enough back then so we moved on to something else.

As I grew up and away, the desire to ride never really subsided. I got into cars, and girls, and other unmentionable things that teenagers do, but in the back of my mind, I still wished I had my own motorcycle. I saved up some money one time and purchased a bike. It was around 250 dollars. It was a 1982 Honda XR80. It purred like a kitten, and I rode it all over the place, since I had access to a dirt road 1/4 block from my house. Where I grew up, if you could get to any dirt road, you could pretty much get to anywhere else in the county without ever getting on a real street. Eventually I moved onward and upward, and the bike just didn't really fit into my lifestyle, and I didn't have a truck to transport the bike around with, so it was more or less useless. I gave the bike to my dad, who lived on a farm, and could use it and take good care of it. After many years of use and enjoyment, it went belly up, and I think he ended up giving it away since it was not working.

Then as a young adult, in my mid 20s in, I found myself in a position where I had quite a bit of expendable cash, and one day it just hit me that I should finally achieve my goal of once again owning my own motorcycle. I am not exactly sure what spurred the thought that day. I was living in a Dallas suburb and was just getting my career into full swing. Maybe I realized that I was losing touch with my childhood, having grown up in a rural area, away from the big cities. So that day, I began looking for a used dirt bike. I searched high and low for one, but never really found anything that was new enough to have modern technology, yet old enough or used enough to be cost effective. Like just about everything else I do, I let the concept grow in my mind, each day justifying buying a more expensive bike, until eventually caving and going nearly three times my allotted budget to get a good bike. It was a 1999 Yamaha Yz400F. At the time, it was the largest 4 stroke motocross bike that Yamaha made. It was 2001 at the time, so the bike was only a couple of years old. Perfect. I rode the bike quite a bit, and it was always a blast, but I soon realized that it was kind of a pain in the ass, because it was a rather lengthy process, to load the thing up into the truck, drive to a place to ride, etc... I had plenty of time, though, so no big deal.

Pretty soon after that, they closed down the government land where I always went to ride. I found another place, but it was an hour's drive away, one way, so it became an even larger pain in the ass. In 2003 I bought a house, and since then, my bike has just sat in the garage, taunting me. It was just too much trouble to try and get to the riding area after work, because it would be nearly dark by the time I got there, and on the weekends, I play hockey and do other stuff, so I just really didn't have time for it. Every time I would walk into the garage, I would feel pain because I really wanted to ride it every single day, and I just couldn't. It really hurt because I finally got what I always wanted and now it just sat there. How could I let this happen?

I decided one day that I would finally do something about it. I would part ways with my beloved dirt bike, and learn to ride a street bike instead. This way I get the thrill of riding, without the hassle of having to go somewhere far away to get it. I ordered a helmet and some gloves off the intertubes, and signed up for a motorcycle riders safety class. The class was fun, and I passed with flying colors. I was the only person in the class to get a perfect score on the final riding test. The next day, I went over to the DMV for the written part of the test. It was a snap. It took all of 15 minutes, I got a perfect score, and just like that, I was a licensed motorcycle operator.

Now all I had to do was obtain a new machine. I put my bike in an ad on cycle-trader.com with plenty of pictures and information. I only had one interested buyer and he ended up not buying the bike. I had not really planned a contingency for not being able to sell it. I guess the only option was to trade it in. I contacted my local Yamaha dealer to inquire about trading in for a new street bike. I got a quote and prepared to take my bike in for the trade. Yay.

Well, I went on vacation and got lazy and lost my motivation, so I just kinda dropped the ball for a few months. During this time, I decided that maybe I should not get a street bike, because almost every single person on the road is either on drugs, on the phone, or a complete fucking moron, and from what I gather, getting run over is really not all that cool, certainly not as cool as they make it look on TV. So there I was again with my precious dirt bike sitting right in front of the garage door, ready to go, looking all sad.

Then, out of the blue a few weeks back, a friend called saying he was buying a bike, and suddenly I was excited about it again. Only he was not getting a street bike, or a dirt bike, he was getting a dual-purpose machine. I had not really spent much time considering this option, but it seems like it might be a perfect fit. You can ride on the streets, then if you see something cool off the beaten path, you can just turn and go there. Turns out Yamaha makes a specific bike that has oversized tires that is reminiscent of the old school Yamaha Big Wheel or the Honda Fat Cat. The bike is the TW200. It sounds perfect.

So I email my guy at the Yamaha shop, and he says he can hook it up, no problem. My credit app was approved instantly, and they could take my trade in. I took my bike in the next day for trade in assessment, and they provided me with an even better option. I leave my bike there and they sell it on consignment. This way, they can sell it for a hell of a lot more than I could, and they take 10% of the proceeds, which is a great deal, assuming that they sell it. If not, I could just tell them I want the blue book value of it, and apply it toward paying off the new bike.

I picked up the new bike the next day.

Here are a couple of pictures of what the motorcycle looks like. Mine is brand new, so the stock photos are exactly how mines looks, so no need for me to take pictures of mine.


The TW200 is an amazing machine. Yamaha got this build exactly right, so they have not changed the design for over two decades. I have ridden around 150 miles on it so far, and its fantastic. I have gotten it up to 70 MPH with the wind at my back, which is about its top speed, but I have also taken it across a freshly plowed Texas pasture, which is quite a feat. It is the best of both worlds. It is a perfect mix of mean dirt bike, and decent road performance. I can ride the bike to work, or go jump hills. I think I have finally found a keeper.

There are a few upgrades I have made, or plan to make. I installed new footpegs, whereas the stock ones were pretty small. I also installed a tail light modulator so the brake light flashes when I use the brakes, to help make me more visible to other drivers. I added a tank bag to carry my junk. Tomorrow I will be adding handguards to protect my hands from rocks, or other misadventures. I have a magnetic drain plug being shipped, and I will also be adding a 12v DC power outlet so I can use a GPS, a portable air pump, or whatever. Additionally, I will be installing a rear rack so that I can carry more stuff when I go on a journey, and I may add a smaller rear sprocket, so that I can achieve higher cruising speeds at lower RPMs. I will probably have a few posts in the future pertaining to some of these upgrades. I think we are going to put up a TW200 web page for customization articles, so I may just put them there instead, but I will put a link to them here. I will post a picture of my bike after I add all these mods.

Anyway, onward and upward!

I had another weird/classic dream. You may or may not remember the last one I had. You can read all about it here.

In my most recent odd dream, I invented the perfect story. In the dream, the story was so perfect that I knew it could easily be made into an award winning movie. It was one of those stories with a lot of twists and turns, and a huge surprise ending. Everyone I told the story to absolutely freaked out and said it was the most amazing story ever. Someone in the dream recommended that make sure that I do not forget the story when I woke up, since I had invented it while I was asleep. So in the dream, I spent the next few days trying absolutely as hard as I could to memorize the story. I wrote the story down on paper a few times a day, with notes in the margins not to forget the story when I woke up. I told more and more people the story, each one more impressed than the last, and I told each listener to remember the story because I might need them to help me with the details later if I forgot for some reason.

I might need to mention here, in case it is not clear, that the story in the dream was real. I actually dreamed a really good story, and not just like the idea or concept of a story in general. Anyway, this is starting to confuse me so I will skip to the chase... I woke up and forgot 99% of the dream, so I lost the story I had invented. In fact, the only thing I can remember was how awesome the story would have been had I not forgotten what it was.



On the 30 day experiment... I am up to running 3.5 miles now, in 20 minutes. I will do a complete post about my progress at a later date, or maybe at the end of the 30 days.

Its odd that the world has changed so much in terms of trust. 50 years ago people trusted each other. The general rule of thumb seemed to be trust a person until they give you a reason not to. Now the exact opposite appears to be true. You should not trust anyone on the planet, until they give you reason to do so. I find this quite interesting. I was born in 1974, and when I was growing up, you really didn't have to lock your car doors or your house doors. Perhaps if you were going to be gone all day or something like that, but certainly not if you were home!

Back then, kids just roamed around without much parental supervision. When I was little, I would go outside, and go play, and not come back until it was dark. My parents had no idea where I was or what I was doing (Thank God.) It is not that they didn't care, there was just a level of societal trust that simply no longer exists. Nowadays, kids hardly ever even go outside the house without some level of supervision, and they sure as hell don't get on their bikes, and ride 10 miles away from there house to go do stuff. I guess as kids get older they might, but I was doing these types of things when I was 6 or 7.

When I was that age you really only had to know one thing. Don't get in the van with the creepy old dude no matter what he says he has in there. That was pretty much the only thing I had to worry about, and it was GREAT!.

It is a damn shame that kids today don't get to experience that type of freedom. These days you have to put a helmet and pads on your kid, then follow them as they ride their bikes so that they don't get ass raped by the multitude of freaks walking around. These days you have to lock your door when you are inside the house so an undesirable doesn't just waltz in, club you in the head with a bat, then jack all your shit. that's pathetic.

If I ever figure out how to build a time machine, I think I may just go back to yesterday, collect the lottery numbers, then jump ahead, win, then port myself back to either the 50s, or perhaps the late 70s, and just live there permanently, because those were fucking good times! Fucking eh!

Something happened Saturday night that happens to every single person on the planet at some time or another. I was sitting on the bench at my hockey game just before the game was about to start. The scorekeeper was walking around the outside of the rink to his booth. As he walked by, he smiled a bit and said something, then laughed. I have absolutely no idea what he said, yet after he said it, I presented a phony laugh as he laughed. I was falsely conveying the belief that I understood what he said, and found it to be humorous. Why did I do that?

A fellow teammate was sitting beside me, and he gave the guy a small laugh as well. I asked him why he laughed, and he said he did not know, because he did not hear what the scorekeeper said either. Why did he do that?

We briefly discussed this phenomenon, but it spurred my imagination greatly. What were we doing? We were basically lying to this man. Is this fair? What if the scorekeeper had something important to say, such as providing us with key information that we may need to survive a holocaust? what if he had travelled from the future and was giving us the outcome of the game, or better yet, that evening's lottery numbers? We deprived this man of truly sharing his well crafted thought, and why? ...to be friendly? Is it friendly to make someone believe that you heard them if you didn't? Perhaps we simply did not want to waste our time with the process of declaring a mis-hear, and having him repeat the verbiage. What if he had repeated what he said, and it turns out that he said his mom was raped and killed by neo-nazis that morning. Then we would have to deal with all that. What if what he said was supposed to be some sort of joke, but it really was not funny whatsoever. Then we would be stuck in a similar scenario where we may feel obligated to laugh anyway, so the dude doesn't fell bad, and jump off a bridge or some shit.

I am really not sure how that article would turn out, I kind of thought I would figure it all out in the process of describing it. Turns out I didn't. It it quite interesting though. What do you do in those scenarios? What should you do? how many licks does it take to get the center of a tootsie roll pop?


...on a side note. I am eating strange food and exercising as planned. I am only on day 2. On day 1 I lost 1.2 pounds. I also discovered that an elliptical device is dramastically different than a treadmill. The last time I got into treadmilling, which was maybe 2 years ago, I could walk for an hour and hardly break a sweat. On the elliptical, I went 15 minutes, and was practically dead. I checked the on-board electronics of the trusty HR1100/A and realized the difference. On the elliptical, I average nearly 10 miles an hour, which on the treadmill, would be practically running full speed. On the elliptical, this is right around 2.5 miles in 15 minutes, which is pretty damn fast, and a LOT of exercise. I challenge anyone who is not used to that kind of crap to try it out. More updates on my progress later.